Hey Sista! Soul Sista!

A Black Consciousness/Pan-Africanist ranting analytical discourse on the transracial transformation of Rachel Dolezal

In June of this year (2015), a white women named Rachel Dolezal, who posed as black for several years – having married and divorced a black man with whom she conceived and birthed a bi-racial son – while serving as President of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), has been “outed” by her white parents? Yeah, Google it!

Basically, a white chick went black and her mother and father want her back – that ain’t news! Although this “going black” scenario can be documented as occurring rather frequently, Rachel Dolezal’s racial identity self-reassignment, though not novel, remains exceptional. As I ponder the curiosity of this transracial transformation, as it were, the voice of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) echoes in my ear:

“That don’t happen even in Hollywood.”

Although, the good brother Malcolm was referring to the existence of a bloodless or “nonviolent” revolution – as it has never happened in recorded history – his words are equally apropos in describing the certain bewilderment experienced by many, including myself, upon hearing of Sista Dolezal’s trans-Rachel (transracial) transformation.

“I don’t go for any nonviolent white liberals. If you are for me and my problems – when I say me, I mean us, our people – then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did.”

~Malcolm X

Sans the long flowing white beard and the 1859 abolitionist suicide mission at the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now, West Virginia), set against a volatile pre-civil war “slavery times” backdrop, Rachel Dolezal is a 21st century Joan (John) Brown!

Essentially then, what makes this story newsworthy is Soul Sista Rachel’s infatuation and identification with the black race to the extent of denouncing her own white privilege; raising a black (bi-racial) son, as a single mother; teaching in the African Studies Program at Eastern Washington University; and serving as a chapter president of the preeminent civil rights organization to raise money for black people – my bad, “colored people” – in the predominantly white city of Spokane, Washington [84.1% White (http://www.city-data.com/city/Spokane-Washington.html)]. Well, dammit, here’s more news! By the powers vested in me, by my hand-me-down, full-length, brown leather, Shaft (1971) trench coat, I hereby proclaim that Rachel Dolezal has earned a wall and wallet-sized, laminated, 40 acres and a mule edition, “I can say the word ‘Nigger’ and not get beat down by one” card.

The NAACP . . . it was founded by white people, right?

Girlfriend Rachel isn’t just Robin Hood, she’s robbin’ for the ‘hood; she’s a spy on our side: “Agent Double White 7”, “Bond . . . Kizzy Bond” [Kizzy “hocked-a-loogie” and spit it into the tin cup of water she was made to fetch for ex-BFF, Missy Anne, who ig’ed (ignored or highsided on) her after 50 years of estrangement – “y’ll ‘memba,” in the movie Roots!].

Black pundits have voiced their indignations at Sista Rachel’s deception, levying that she has immorally crossed the “color-line,” having neither a genealogical nor experiential claim on black misery, all the while having a “get out of being black” card at the ready . . . so what?! She did some good work raising a few dollars for “you people.” Besides, if she genuinely loves black folk so much and wants to be black so badly as to subject herself to the very real possibility of police harassment and “ass whoopins” with complimentary asphalt facials, it’s her prerogative; she can do that – she’s white!

“To us, the man who adores the Negro is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him.”

~Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (French, 1952; English 1967)

Speaking of dissonance, throngs of black folk have passed for white and have been called out for trying to pass as white since 1508, when Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint white Jesus, white God, white angels, white Adam with white Eve and all types of white folk – except a “white devil” – on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Vatican palace, Rome). Now, black folk are crying foul after a courageous white woman – courageous, because there’s yet to surface any evidence that’s she’s crazy and even Malcolm X said white folk thought John Brown was nuts – has willingly discarded the uniform of the highly organized championship white team to don the colors of the fledgling and disordered black squad. Why are we complaining? Is it that many of us hold “whiteness-ness” in such high regard that we are incredulous when anyone does not – with every legitimate and manufactured means available – seek to obtain, maintain and defend it; even from the grave?

My Sista Rachel actually walked directly into the “moral light” Dr. King spoke of that individuals may see:

“Lamentably, it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but . . . groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”

Even more lamentable, from at least 1508 to the present, black folk en masse, have voluntarily turned away from our cultural heritage, genetic beauty and racial origins (Africa); despising and ridiculing our own blackness. How then can Trans-Rachel be charged with appropriating black culture when we don’t embrace it ourselves? Most of us are ignorant of contemporary black history beyond Oprah, President Obama and Beyoncé. We are even more ignorant of black history regarding and beyond MLK and the civil rights movement; only knowing of enslavement through Alex Haley’s Roots (Published 1976; Television miniseries 1977) – only a few of us actually read the book or any book – and more recently, the major motion picture 12 Years a Slave (2013). Hell, there’s even uproar of laughter among a grouping of two black people, when the “Afro” or the holiday “Kwanzaa” is mentioned. Trans-Rachel teaches African Studies and rocks a curly perm. I would bet that she even celebrates “Juneteenth” . . . Do you?

“. . . up until 1959 Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. And by the colonial powers of Europe having complete control over Africa, they projected the image of Africa negatively. They projected Africa always in a negative light: jungles, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized. Why then naturally it was so negative [that]it was negative to you and me, and you and I began to hate it. We didn’t want anybody telling us anything about Africa, much less calling us Africans. In hating Africa and in hating the Africans, we ended up hating ourselves, without even realizing it; because you can’t hate the roots of a tree, and not hate the tree. You can’t hate your origin and not end up hating yourself. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself. You show me one of these people over here who has been thoroughly brainwashed and has a negative attitude toward Africa, and I’ll show you one who has a negative attitude toward himself. You can’t have a positive attitude toward yourself and a negative attitude toward Africa at the same time. To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude toward Africa becomes positive, you’ll find that your understanding of and your attitude toward yourself will also become positive; and this is what the white man knows.

So, they very skillfully make you and me hate our African identity; our African characteristics.

You know yourself, that we have been a people who hated our African characteristics. We hated our heads, we hated the shape of our nose – we wanted one of those long doglike noses, you know; we hated the color of our skin; hated the blood of Africa that was in our veins. And in hating our features and our skin and our blood, why, we had to end up hating ourselves. And we hated ourselves. Our color became to us a chain — we felt that it was holding us back. Our color became to us like a prison, which we felt was keeping us confined, not letting us go this way or that way. We felt that all of these restrictions were based solely upon our color, and the psychological reaction to that would have to be that as long as we felt imprisoned or chained or trapped by black skin, black features, and black blood, that skin and those features and that blood holding us hack automatically had to become hateful to us. And it became hateful to us. It made us feel inferior; it made us feel inadequate; made us feel helpless.”

In a January 1, 2013 article entitled, “Africa: Where black is not really beautiful,” Pumza Fihlani, of BBC News, Johannesburg, wrote:

“A recent study by the University of Cape Town suggests that one woman in three in South Africa bleaches her skin . . . most people say they use skin-lighteners because they want ‘white skin’.”

Fihlani further explains that, ”. . . skin-lightening is not just a fascination and obsession of women.” He quotes a Congolese hair stylist, whose mother used bleaching creams on him as a child in efforts to make him “less black” and now has been receiving bi-yearly skin bleaching injections for the past decade:

“I pray every day and I ask God, ‘God why did you make me black?’ I don’t like being black. I don’t like black skin.”

Also mentioned in Pumza Fihlani’s article is The World Health Organization report, Preventing Disease Through Healthy Environments: Mercury In Skin Lightening Products. The publication identifies Nigeria as having the highest percentage of its female population (77%) regularly using skin lightening creams and soaps, among African and Asian nations where bleaching products and practices are most common. Togo (59%), South Africa (35%), Senegal (27%) and Mali (25%) follow Nigeria, the “African Giant.” http://www.who.int/ipcs/assessment/public_health/mercury_flyer.pdf

That’s skin, now let’s talk hair . . .

“Now take these kinks out of your mind, instead of out of your hair.”

~Marcus Garvey

Long before a black female child navigates the birth canal, all of the adult women that will hold a position of influence in her life (mother, grandmothers, aunts, sisters) are conspiring to determine the precise moment in her development to straighten – and now weave – her hair, essentially, stripping the young queen of her crown of coils, replacing it with a shammy of shame; initiating, in most instances, life-long self-abasing rituals to approximate the existing European (white) standard of beauty.

“. . . attractiveness is determined by the artificial standard each community selects. In this country, the standard is the blond, blue-eyed, white-skinned girl with regular features. . . . there is no room for deviation. Women expend great effort in bringing themselves to an approximation of the ideal. The girl who is black has no option in the matter of how much she will change herself. Her blackness is the antithesis of creamy white skin, her lips are thick, her hair is kinky and short.”

“. . . from the time of her birth, the little girl must submit to efforts aimed at changing the appearance of her hair. . . . Her hair is kinky and combing is painful, but her mother must hold her and force her to submit to it. As far back as her memory will take her, the black woman recalls the painful daily ritual of having her hair combed. It is not insignificant that this painful process is administered in a dispassionate way by the mother. Surely the deadly logic of children would try to explain this phenomenon in some such fashion: ‘if such pain is administered with such regularity by one who purports to love me, then the end result must be extremely important.’ And yet, however she might search, the child will never find a reason weighty enough to justify the pain to which she must submit.”

“For in fact, the combing . . . results only in the child’s being rendered ‘acceptable.’ The combing does not produce a stunningly beautiful child from an ugly one, but simply an acceptably groomed child. . . . She is simply considered to be of an acceptable appearance.”

“Again, the logic of children would raise the question: ‘if Mother has to inflict such pain on me to bring me to the level of acceptability, then I must have been ugly indeed before the combing.’ For the implications and regularity and torture involved suggest that it is of vital importance that the child not be seen in her ‘natural state.’”

“Now there is nothing unique about grooming being painful for children. . . . for most people the discomforts associated with soap, toothbrushes, combs, and slippery bathtubs are transient, experienced mainly by the child who has not quite mastered the technique. . . . but for the black girl the combing continues as a daily ritual up to the magic day when she is introduced to the hairdresser.”

“At the time of this writing the overwhelming majority of Negro (sic) women have their hair ‘fixed’ . . . . Usually there is some incidental burning of the scalp. The ordeal itself is long and tiresome . . . . To look ‘presentable’ . . . . Thus the black woman is never free of the painful reminder that she must be transformed from her natural state to some other state in order to appear presentable to her fellow men.

“One might ask how this process differs from the ritual to which her Caucasian sister submits for the purpose of similar cosmetic effect. The difference may be a fine one, but it is crucial. The Caucasian woman can brush her hair with a minimum of discomfort and look quite acceptable for any public appearance. If she submits to the pain and discomfort of the hairdresser’s, it is for the purpose of beautification—it is to enhance her natural appearance which in itself is considered acceptable by her peers. For black women, the pressing comb is like the curse of Eve, a painful, humiliating experience to which she is bound to submit—which, moreover, seems like a wretched legacy grafted into her flesh by her mother.”

Too deep? Ok, here’s a contemporary “dollars & senses” translation:

In the reuters.com article “In Africa, haircare becomes a multi-billion dollar industry (Wed Aug 6, 2014, 1:00 am EDT),” author and journalist, David Dolan, reports that liquid haircare products (shampoos, relaxers and hair lotions) sold in South Africa, Nigeria and Cameroon were estimated by market research firm, Euromonitor International, as totaling $1.1 billion for the year 2013. Moreover, other sources estimate the African continent’s “dry hair (weaves, extensions and wigs made from human to yak hair and synthetic fibres)” industry in the range of $6 billion yearly. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/06/africa-hair-idUSL6N0Q667520140806

So, the love affair black people have with long, “silky” – and too often blond – white folk hair is rooted in white supremacy-black inferiority indoctrination and is perpetuated in the psychologically damaged black girl-child who endures a brutal, yet futile beautification process that is physically ameliorated, though psychologically and spiritually festered, in maturity through the application of “product,” the hairdresser’s artistry and tresses technology (wigs, weaves, extensions, etc.); ultimately amounting to a multi-billion dollar reparations payment. Even if this analysis is categorically rejected by some or is too mentally distressing to contemplate by others, consider the following question as a purely academic exercise:

How many black baby dolls with chocolate skin and kinky hair are little white girls playing with?

Again, lamentably, the black world has somehow forgotten, suppressed or sadly don’t know of the important experiments conducted by Doctors Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1930s and 1940s, where black children overwhelmingly identified white-skinned, blonde haired dolls as good, pretty and having a better skin color than black dolls who were said to be bad and ugly. I’m certain though, Rachel Dolezal, as an African Studies instructor is familiar with the work of the Clarkes, who provided the empirical evidence of the psychologically damaging effects – self-hatred and alienation – of segregation (white supremacy/racism) upon black children for the 1954 landmark civil rights case, Brown vs. Board of Education, which was argued and won before the United States Supreme Court. Moreover, I dare speculate that if Sis Rachel had born a bi-racial daughter, she would not be playing with blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbies.

“Mothers! Give your children dolls that look like them to play with and cuddle.”

~Marcus Garvey

Just for the hell of it, gift a coffee black doll baby to the child of a white friend and closely observe the parents’ and their friends’ (blacks and whites) initial reactions. Then later, while paying an unannounced visit – with exaggerated wide-eyed, open mouth smile, white girl Becky enthusiasm – inquire about the black dolls whereabouts.

Here’s another question:

If Michelangelo’s blond, silky-haired, emaciated, blue-eyed white Jesus was replaced with a shiny and brawny, ebony-skinned, nappy ‘fro, beady-bearded Brotha with “taco meat” chest hair, draped in a shoulder-to-floor dashiki, how many white folk would be in church on Sunday? How many black folk would be in church on Sunday? . . . Would YOU be in church on Sunday?

Tiptoeing ever so gently away from that IED (insightful education device) and turning from the ridiculous to the absurd – skin to hair, or hair to skin; both nonsense – to the “that don’t make no damn sense”:

On January 30, 2013 (10:01 am EST), Huffington Post Style & Beauty Editor, Julee Wilson, ran the peculiarly titled article, African Men Who Tattoo Their Lips Pink To Look More Attractive (VIDEO). The article reports that in Nigeria, some men are tattooing their bottom lips bubblegum pink to look more appealing. If the trend appears at all incredulous, the article provides a 90 second video, posted by Batta Box TV, of a young man undergoing the $30 – $40 pucker pinking procedure (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHiBomcZ0Ms). Also noteworthy, the article begins with a reference to an earlier report of Senegalese women tattooing their gums black to augment, through contrast, their teeth. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/30/african-men-tattoo-lips-pink_n_2581152.html

Again, for those of us who may have been misinformed or misheard or just don’t fully comprehend; a white woman, Rachel Dolezal, legally took money from the benevolent white folk of Spokane, Washington and gave it to the city’s poor and oppressed “colored people.” Most black folk I know, on either side of the Atlantic, ain’t down for the “get down,” like my girl Rachel is—“when the revolution come”—and have contributed little, if anything at all, to the fights against racism (white supremacy); sexism; ageism; homophobia and zenophobia; child abuse and pedophilia; people trafficking, rape and sexual slavery; poverty, unregulated capitalism and economic exploitation; environmental destruction and global climate change; capital punishment and torture; fascism, religious fanaticism and creationism; cancer, AIDS and Ebola; animal cruelty; illiteracy, ignorance and stupidity; bad driving; men’s’ sagging-crotch pants and women’s’ skinny-leg jeans in any size above actually skinny; near-beer (non/low-alcoholic); all personal ringtones (they’re too freakin’ loud, freakin’ obnoxious and answer your freakin’ phone!); sugar-free anything and low-fat everything (especially ice-cream and cookies – are you kiddin’ me?!); and those damn awful Mary Jane ballet flats – if you’re passed third grade, please, put on a real shoe!

I think Frantz Fanon (quoted above) was accurate in his assertion of black folk harboring contempt for both those who “adore” and “abominate” “the Negro.” Further, it is beyond hypocritical when highfalutin, politically opportunistic black people attack a white woman for telling a little white lie about being black – culture appropriation, seriously? – when black folk/Africans have been appropriating (copying) white folk/European culture ever since we were introduced to white Jesus by white missionaries (slave traders) who benevolently traveled all the way to “deepest, darkest Africa” to civilize our black heathen savage asses even though we already had our own religions and gods – who looked like us – but quickly denounced and began singing of the miraculous skin-bleaching properties of white Jesus’s blood:

“Oh! Precious is thy flow

That makes me white as snow

No other fount I know,

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

~ Robert Lowery, Nothing but the Blood (published 1876)

Yeah, copying white/European culture is by design, because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery; and everyone knows the copy is eventually crumpled up and thrown away – and we’re actually the damn original! Religion, language, names, clothing, hair, skin, holidays . . . all copied, while black/African cultural elements were banned and suppressed and are now forgotten, loathed and dying.

So, please, next time you see a white guy wearing a dashiki and “dreadlocks” or a white girl with “cornrows” and cowrie shells, don’t hate because you’re stuffed into a wool three-piece English lounge (business) suit, choked by your neck-tie (noose/pretty silk ribbon) or are frantically patting your skull as grit and grime itches the hell out of your scalp beneath that ton of heat and moisture retaining weave that used to be somebody else’s or most probably some animal’s hair.

Moreover, we make excuses for denying black culture; “That’s too black” and “That’s not professional.”

“If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

~Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)

Although not endowed at birth with rich chocolate skin, Rachel Dolezal, based on the evidence, was an actual soldier in the Black Power movement rather than just caricaturing a black street persona promulgating decadence and misogyny via expletive and epithet laden “lyrics” like many non-black hip-hoppers that are often times blindly venerate by our youth because of their novelty. President Obama, “a black face in a high place” – rather the “highest place” – is serious novelty: a bi-racial US president whose forefathers didn’t arrive in the new world chained aboard slave ships, where on his watch, Sistaz and Brothaz continue to be beaten down, gunned down and “sent up the river” by bitch-ass racist cops – I’m just sayin’.

Whenever there is the slightest mention of President Obama’s apparent disinterest in black folk affairs or a suggestion forwarded as to what he could (should) be doing for us, the response is always, “he can’t do that . . . he the president for the whole country . . . he can’t just help black people.” Why not?! The other 43 only helped white people and No, Lincoln didn’t free us – we started fightin’ and freeing ourselves well before he came along wanting to ship us anywhere except back to Africa – because, most of the enslaved were in the confederacy where Jefferson Davis was president and Lincoln’s politically expedient emancipation proclamation had no jurisdiction and neither Kennedy, Clinton nor any other liberal, Democrat, Republican or conservative did or does much for us, because, lamentably, to them . . . Black Lives DON’T Matter!

“For real-for real, though?” if you’re keeping score, pound-for-pound, Sista-girl Rachel has ostensibly outperformed Barack Obama on the “you’re a credit to your race” scale – yeah, I said it and I mean it!!

Both look bi-racial:

She has an aerosol tan with a frizzy-curly perm

He’s “light skinned-ed” with curly hair

Both say they are black:

She claims a black father figure (a descendant of U.S. enslaved Africans)

He “Dreams from My Father”, 1995 (native Kenya, East Africa)

Both are working parents:

She’s a single mother who commutes from home to work

He works at home in public housing

Both were part-time University professors:

– She was an African Studies professor (instructor) at Eastern Washington University

She heads/ed the Spokane, Washington NAACP (works/ed for “colored people”)

He heads the U.S. government in gentrified Washington, DC (works for corporate internationalists/wealthy white folk and a few wealthy “colored people”)

Is anybody reminded of The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee (published, March 1969; motion picture, 1973)? At all? Just me? OK . . .

So, yeah, a white woman actually passed for a “light skinned-ed,” “light-eyed,” frizzy haired black woman. The fact that she, as a black woman, wasn’t wearing a weave or her hair wasn’t fried straighter than straight should have served as an alarm that something was amiss. Seriously though, here in the motherland, but missing “my peeples” back in the U.S., I think back on the last few years I spent in Washington, DC feeling so proud and so happy seeing more and more Sistaz of all ages wearing natural hair styles; it really filled my heart. I even shared with a number of black women that, “short natural hair on a Sista is like kryptonite to me.” It’s true!! Then I woke up in Nigeria, West Africa – rather weave Africa, ground zero!! When I actually see a black woman with a short natural, I smile inside, nod my head and know that the entire continent is not Upside Down (Fela Kuti, 1976).

Just a thought; what if FLOTUS (First Lady Of The United States) had a serious black power Afro like Angela Davis, Elain Cleaver or Queen Tiye [Akhenaten’s mamma, King Tut’s grandmamma and Nefertiti’s mamma-in-law (Kemetan/Egyptian Amarna Dynasty, c. 1390 – 1353 BCE)]?

At any rate, many people – black to white – will dismiss Rachel Dolezal as “crazy” or somehow “psychologically damaged” . . . you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. As well, so what if she can effortlessly go back to being white? “Whammy, bammy, thank you ‘Mammy’,” the money has been spent and progress has been made – albeit, always a day late, a dollar short and a half-step forward.

On this final point, I begin closing with the following reference. Entitled, Excerpt from a conversation between Gordon Parks and Malcolm X, February 19, 1965, Malcolm-x.org features a dialogue between Malcolm X and Gordon Parks (African-American photographer, musician, writer and film director), where Malcolm admits regret in turning away a young white female collegian who had once expressed interest in uniting the “BlackMuslims” and whites. Mr. Parks is also the narrator:

“Brother,” he said finally, ”remember the time that white college girl came into the restaurant — the one who wanted to help the Muslims and the whites get together — and I told her there wasn’t a ghost of a chance and she went away crying?”

Finally then, To all to whom these presents may come Greetings, Be it Known that, Rachel Dolezal . . . has accordingly been admitted to the identity of an honorary “Colored People” with all the risks, liabilities, self-alienation and knees-to-the-back-of-the-neck by “The Man” belonging thereto . . .